Search - Beecham, Wagner, Lpo :: Conducts Wagner

Lyrical Wagner from Beecham's best period, but oh the sound!

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 03/15/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"No composer suffers more from dated mono sound than Wagner, so these recordings by Beecham of "bleeding chunks" are hobbled from the start. They date from 1936-38 with the London Phil. Despite his frivolous exterior Beecham was a serious, if improbable Wagnerite. His tendecy was to be refreshingly quick and lyrical at a time when those virtues were rare in Wagner conducting.



We get some notable solo singing and choral work in the excerpts from Meistersinger and Gotterdammerung, including a long (11 min.) scene when Hagen summons the clan in Act III, but these are the most limited of the recordings sonically. Torsten Ralf's Prize Song is quite lovely, however, and beaautifully conducted. The surfaces are impeccably clean, which helps, yet after a while it gets tiring to have to compensate for the dated sonics. Taken a bit at a time, this is an impressive representation of Beecham's skill in the opera pit, where he spent the bulk of his major career."